Word: marxists
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...problems has been to make a successful case that there is any kind of superpower meddling in the stricken region-any meddling, that is, aside from its own. Congressmen have leaped quickly upon the Administration's barely concealed support for the guerrilla warfare of disaffected rebels against the Marxist-led Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Legislators have been unwilling to accept Reagan's oft-repeated assertion that the four-year-old insurgency in El Salvador is covertly sponsored by the Soviet Union and its revolution-oriented client states...
From sources in Washington and Central America, TIME has pieced together many aspects of the nature of the Marxist-Leninist interference in El Salvador that worries Washington. The picture that emerges is of a sophisticated strategy that takes advantage of the region's terrain and circumstances, and, above all, of the weaknesses of the U.S.-backed Salvadoran forces. The guerrillas, says a Washington-based intelligence analyst, "are really good. They're flexible. There are no Ho Chi Minh trails this time...
Soon after the early Nicaraguan smuggling operations into El Salvador, Washington began trying to document Marxist-Leninist interference in that country. In February 1981 the Reagan Administration sent a white paper to its West European and Latin American allies, concluding that the Salvadoran civil war had been "transformed into a textbook case of indirect aggression by Communist powers...
Modern geopolitics and warfare changed the governmental attitude. Franklin Roosevelt understood the strategic importance of Latin America during World War II. Harry Truman endorsed those ideas. Dwight Eisenhower was humiliated by Fidel Castro's Marxist government, and Ike planned the Bay of Pigs, which John Kennedy launched and bungled. For all of that, rousing this nation to any deep and lasting interest in Lathi America was impossible. Even with rumors flying around Washington in the summer of 1962 about the Soviet buildup in Cuba, Kennedy was only half listening, although he ordered U-2 surveillance that discovered the offensive...
...issue is now of "capital importance" to this country. She does note a grudging but significant change in the debate that could signal some deeper sensitivity and a realization of the importance of Latin America. Only a few months ago, she says, few people were talking about another Marxist state in the Caribbean or the extension of Soviet bases and even missiles into the area. Now nobody really dismisses those possibilities...